An International Smoothie

Changing Strategy

Indeed. Picture courtesy of Chris Radley.

One of the few good things about having time off while you wait for people to heal is the opportunity for introspection it provides you with. The rare relief to take a step back and think about what you're adding to what you do.

This time off coupled with PSFK's excellent series: Spur from Redscout (brought to my attention by the super smart Gareth Kay) have meant that yes, I've been thinking about stwategy. 

When I first started applying to agencies, it was deemed I was "too unorthodox" and thus wouldn't be a good account exec, and because I didn't go to art school or have a partner, it would be impossible for me to have a creative thought. So almost by default (or maybe by blogging) I was branded (get it?) a planner. I was pretty damn happy because while some of the smartest and most generous people I'd met also happened to be planner/strategy types, the vast majority of them didn't fit the image that was being projected of the account planner. Regardless, I hoped I'd be able to absorb some of that collective and individual awesomeness by osmosis.

Imagine my surprise then, at the identity crisis and the need for validation that permeates through vast chunks of the strategic community with frightening regularity.

Brand, channel, engagement, immersion, emerging media, technology and many more that I can't remember. All these words are prefixes to strategy, to planner. And I believe all are wide of the mark. 

Then there are the plannery things that are to be done. Drink tea, wear a cardigan, buy suitably plannery glasses. Call yourself a geek, stare out the window, be disparaging in equal amounts about your useless account management and egotistical and petulant creatives. 

Read Stephen King, romanticize about how you would run the agency, obsess over the perfect proposition, make sure you remain 'strategically aloof' in meetings so your impeccable strategic nous cannot be questioned. Sit in your ivory tower with other planners and propagate rampant intellectualism. 

Use big words when smaller ones will do. Talk about doing powerpoint a hell of a lot.

Stop. being. a. douchebag.

We bemoan the fact that our clients are trapped in antiquated models of media and thinking, yet we restrict our own job descriptions with the same philosophy. 

The suits 'do', the planners 'think' and the creatives 'draw/write'. 

What if I want to think about something, sketch a crude solution, talk to the creatives and muck up a concept and present it to a client at the end of a weekly status? Is that cool? Will we, as individuals and a collective industry survive? WILL THE CLIENT BE OK WITH IT?!?

I had the pleasure of lunch with Paul Isakson just before Christmas last year and he said a ton of smart things, one of which I remember being:

 "I stopped caring about being a planner a long time ago". 

And then it struck me. The people who are the best at marketing strategy are the ones who really don't care about planning. They just solve problems.

It's something Eaon and I wrestled with at Geronimo while coming up with what we called an innovation brief. There's a real need to break out of this "Client must brief us before we can think about something" mentality that plagues the industry. If I was a client I'd be disgusted if the company I hired to solve my communication problems only thought about something when I told them to. In fact, if I didn't get proactive solutions from my agency, I'd fire them and hire somebody who would.

We figured out that essentially, our job was to identify business problems and then create solutions for said problems that were contextual, culturally relevant, rewarding and engaging for people. And then impress upon our clients the need for that solution. So that's how I define what I do. Job titles be damned.

The masses of poor quality work we see and the repeated marketing-related disasters that crop up in the trade rags weekly are in my opinion, more of an indictment of the strategic community than any other. Aren't we supposed to be the ones hired for our saber-sharp intellect? Because let's be honest, we're not here because we look good!

I think there are some broad areas that we can improve to be better (insert your choice of flavor here) strategists.

1. Understand the individual pressures of your colleagues' and clients' jobs and then impress upon them that you're not there to show them up intellectually, but to make them better at their jobs. You should want them to be valued, get promoted and to get recognized for their achievements just as much as you want those things for yourself. Measure what you do by what they are held accountable for. You'll never have an 'irrelevant' idea again.

2. Immerse yourself in humanity (it's the best phrase I could come up with). We aren't burdened by budgets or studio deadlines, so we should (as I believe was the point of planning in the first place) take time to read, watch, listen and understand everything about the world in which we live in. Not the office, not the post/zip code, not the city. But the world. What are people's cultural references? Why? 

The world has never really seen the mass migration that the past 2-3 generations experienced and there is no such thing as a homogenous culture (apart form perhaps some advertising agencies staff). Whether we like it or not, it's our job to know about Lost, Twilight, Microsoft's next operating system, Mass Effect 2, Avatar and High School Musical 3, American/Pop Idol, Big Brother, what Hugo Chavez is doing in Venezuela, Dan Brown, the resurgence of the fixie scene, the situation in Palestine, what our budget deficit is, house prices, what's on the front page of the Enquirer / Daily Mail, how factory strikes in China may constrain laptop production this year and so on and so on. 

Being a sponge means when it's time to distill our thinking down to that one perfect point, we have all the raw materials we need to make that point an absolutely bone-crunchingly "Boom" point.

3. Quickly move to a place where we begin to get uncomfortable again. Shake it up. Do what you haven't done. Defy convention. Break some rules. Ask for criticism. Ask to work on the most difficult piece of business in your company. Ask for forgiveness and not for permission. Inject some passion and lava back into our workplaces. Don't let the accountants win. Everyone knows a child who always asks "Why?" until you get to a point where you just say "That's how it is!!" and the kid shoots you a look where he knows you're trying to stop the conversation. Be that kid and never stop asking why.

4. Take interest in seeing things through to the end. And figure out how you can help. It's completely alien to me how someone could 'hand off' a brief and then see it next when something is presented to a client. Being well versed in all things tech is pretty damn crucial here, to help you stay ahead of the curve as well as help you get ideas to clients quicker, get approval quicker and get to market quicker. "But you'll step on creatives' toes!!" I hear some people saying. I'm not saying do their job, I'm saying help them do it better.

5. Don't constrain your and your company's ambitions by thinking only about client communications. Please, it's only been said a gajillion times. Make things and make things happen. And make it amazing.

There are more of course, and I'm probably off-target with a lot of what I've written, but that's the comments section and y'all are for :)

Let's make strategy awesome again.

Making It Matter

The power of what we do. Image courtesy of emmapebble

I've had a lot of time recently to think about family. And given the particular hand that fate has dealt my family, who apart from myself are all doctors, my thoughts have turned to medicine. Medicine is one of those professions where those on the outside wax lyrical about the nobility that accompanies the pursuit of one's income, but those within the profession often become jaded and the pursuit of saving lives often takes a back seat to administration, KPIs and trying to get out the door at exactly 1700 when a patient walks into the clinic at 1655.

I was discussing this with my brother (who's just about to finish med school) when he made a couple of points that have in the last couple of days really started to resonate with me, given where I think we should be headed as an industry and what I want to do with my career. He told me about this 'Careers in International Medicine' workshop that he went too (you could say the international smoothieness runs through all the Ismail veins) and how he was told by a bunch of people that when you finish med school, you think you can save the world one patient at a time. After a few years you think it's field work in nations with less developed healthcare that will save the world, you soon realize that aid is all about money, and therefore all about governments giving money. But politics is a dirty game, and he was told politicians really only answer to one thing, and that's mass communication. Or more accurately, the pressure that mass communication can put on them by giving the masses information that the politicians may not necessarily want in the public realm. Readers from the UK will know that the MP expenses scandal is a perfect example of this. All this has got me ruminating on communications and the role our industry can play in doing amazing stuff.

It's easy to lose focus when we're being pulled to two extremes, the pressure of having to produce creative that will eventually entered into award shows that never matter and are presided over by failed directors, artists et al; and the pressure we face when forced to increase sales year-on-year that sucks any kind of innovation or intellectual enthusiasm out of our work.

Having a job where we have input into how businesses behave and communicate in in the 21st century is an immense responsibility given the challenges we face as economies and as a collective humanity. To waste that opportunity by chasing frivolity or mechanical efficiency would be a massive shame.

The future of communications isn't Twitter, or the internet or whatever else banal trend watchers would have you believe. It's doing something worthwhile for a person or people, be it education, providing a service or removing a barrier that stops them doing what they want to do in their day to day existence.

It's that simple.

Sometimes it's easy to lose sight of that, the vast potential we ignore on a day to day basis, so props to my little bro for reminding me how fortunate we are, and why this really matters.

The Wrong Questions

Picture via The B@man

An oft-quoted but still understated benefit of being someone getting to grips with working life in the midst of the (often ridiculed) blogosphere is the enormous amount of wisdom that is out there. To be able to work with, befriend, listen to and read the work of amazing people everyday is something that many of us take for granted but remains an enormous privilege and benefit of the fantastic times we live in.

To that end, I must give thanks to (in no particular order) Mark, Hugh, Lloyd, Johnnie, Neil, George, Doddsy, Charlie, Paul and Eaon for their individual and in the end collective inspirations (along with the many many others that sit in the blogroll - I read them all and so should y'all) that have got me to this point, where at 3am on a Wednesday morning I'm grinning like an idiot and unable to sleep. So I blog...

Since starting in the big bag world of advertising (full-time at least) the phrases 'context is everything' and 'everything changes' have been two of the staples that I fall back on. Not just in the advertising framework, but the life framework. We spend so much time at work that trying to break it down from the time when you're 'living' is a futile exercise; either you're living all day everyday or you're dead at work. In which case you really should find some other way to earn your daily bread. Because life is, as we're so often reminded, never as long as we think.

Back to these fantastic times then. Words like convergence, utility, passion and downturn are thrown around, remixed and spat out as if this journey that we're all was either mapped out by some people a hundred years ago and we're just passing checkpoints or we're somehow in a vacuum that means we can ride out the storm without so much as a drop of water on our collective communication industry anoraks. No.

Not a single soul planned for this contingency (where are all the trends and forecasting people now? I haven't heard a single word from them on the collapse of capitalism - either in the form of a prediction or an attempt at the beginnings of a solution) and we can't huddle in our ghettos of Madison Avenue and London's West End waiting for the storm to pass. It's not a storm, it's not a story, it's something we'll all have to adapt to. It's change. And whether you believe in it or not is irrelevant. Because it's here, having crashed through our front doors and it's now sitting in our front rooms, waiting for us to acknowledge its presence.

The fantastic thing about this situation is that no-one knows what's going to happen. Isn't that amazing? We can hypothesize that issuing bonds and throwing more cash a wound that cash caused will only help to salve the wound long enough to surprise us when things crash again - but we don't know. We can say we're going to move towards a simpler way of living and exchanging goods for services - but we don't know. The point is to put ourselves, as self-proclaimed creative businesspeople in a position to shape, learn and be involved in the debate as it unfolds. In that light I find the We20 happenings fascinating and look forward to the great minds that will be present when these meetings begin.

So we know change is coming, how does that affect us in our ivory communications towers? In the last week or so I've been asked to comment on recent comms work for Sony and Toyota - in both instances I've been told that it's great work, or a technological tour de force. Before I had a look at both pieces, I did a quick search for how these companies are performing - because of course at the root of it all, effective communication will solve business problems. I found that Sony's net profit fell 95% in year on year terms and Toyota is widely rumored to be slipping into its first net loss since 1950. Read that last sentence again, these are things you hear about when wars happen, not when downturns occur. Within this context, I find it hard to think about how the cost and effort of organising and producing an ad is at all relevant to how help a slumping consumer electronics giant - or how being able to move your hand in front of a webcam to simulate a test drive is going to convince me, or anyone else in fact to spend money on a new car. It's the advertising equivalent of "mine's bigger than yours". These things may well have their place, but I'll venture a guess that today, these are not the ideal points of focus. When I mentioned this, I was told that it was great work, and great work would always have a place - no matter the economic conditions.

My reply to this was two-fold, this may not just be a condition, it may be a transformation - a paradigm shift if you will and the questions we ask ourselves in the definition of 'great' work may be incorrect. Great work is contextual, in terms of the product, service, market, political landscape and socioeconomic climate. That's what makes it great. That what shows passion. To have the drive to sweat out the small stuff and build upon a solid foundation of knowledge of the world that distills into knowledge of a particular product/service area. Like genius, passion is perspiration followed by inspiration. Every pound/dollar/euro (they're almost worth the same now so I can probably get away with grouping them together) that is spent on marketing is a luxury so we must think and then think again as to how to make it have a lasting positive effect on the company/product/service we are pimping. Not how to get a creative hard-on when we roll statistics of how epic the production was, or how we used a never thought of visual effect to deliver something sexy. Note I'm not saying bells and whistles are superflous. I'm saying if we make them the centerpiece then it's a waste of money. Eaon calls it making every action a service positive interaction - I'm personally not so comfortable with all those syllables but the point remains. Move your brand/product/service forward with everything you do - from a customer's point of view. In the context of our world today.

At NESTA yesterday Peter Bazalgette made an excellent point that sometimes needs repeating more often, particular in hallowed halls of advertising agencies/idea companies/whatever.

"The truth is that not a single media company knows what its model will be in ten year's time"

Again, no-one knows. But they know it's changing. So rather than clinging to the edifices of a brilliant past, ask yourself how will I make the future awesome?

This leads me to my next point on passion and positivity. The words are bandied about all the time. But this is the time when passion will really show. So shut up and show it. Don't talk about it. Live it. Some social media luminaries proclaimed that it's easier to be positive and deluded because dealing with bs is something people can't face up to. Lord Carter yesterday then quite astutely pointed out that "being a pessimist is a national activity". Again I thought some people are just asking the wrong questions.

Yes the world's climate is screwed, the global economy is trashed and wars are ravaging innocent people everywhere. If you can't deal with reality then go to a corner and deal with it. I've said time and time again and it's reinforced even more often by the great people around me that this is an opportunity to exact change. To make something a little better. That makes my juices flow (liquid metaphor placed for Eaon and Neal at Geronimo) more than a Cannes Lion or an invite an awards show will ever do. If you're asking someone why they would even attempt to help make a change then get out of the way and let someone who's asking how they can help show up.

Kd tweeted out a quote that is much more eloquent about it then I could ever be:

"Pessimism is a luxury of good times...In difficult times, pessimism is a self-fulfilling, self-inflicted death sentence" - Evelin Linder

Or as I like to put it: Fuck off and smile.

And it's dawned on me that my last point in all this fits rather nicely. And that's about the awesomeness of those you hang your hat with. I was on my way home and fired up Twitter when the dude next to me pointed to an article he was reading about how the existence of Tweetdeck on my laptop was a clear indicator to a huge lack of self-esteem and a cavernous hole in my soul that was probably down to playing videogames and watching WWF (it was called that back in the day). Aside from the irony of people sitting in designer clothes chastising you about your lack of self-worth, it's not about Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or anything.

It's the people.

The people. The community. The homies. The posse. The whatever word you use to talk about people. I find it hard to start defending my use/lack of use of Twitter or any other tool because the mechanism has very little to do with the motive. It's the people. Those who lay into Twitter/Brightkite/whatever might not understand the point. The point isn't to tell people what you're doing. The point is to learn from others, to push yourself forward and take whatever you can with you. If you don't like it then don't be on it. Everyone finds something that works for them. Do that. But if someone finds meaning in something you don't please don't become a hater. But if you find yourself in the midst of haters, let them hate. It's their job.

So, everyday we should ask ourselves:
How can I be better at what I do in light of what I see around me today?
How can I make the best of myself in these amazing times in preparation for whatever may come?
How can I learn from those better than me?

In spite of our self-appointed grandeur and majesty as custodians of this planet, we still cannot choose when change comes - only how we will react when it does. We haven't been getting a lot of good answers. Maybe we just need to ask better questions.

The Future By Paul Isakson

What's Next In Marketing & Advertising

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